00:10:13 · Po-Shen Loh
[00:10:13] S2: Didn't really know what to do next because they thought that the point of life was to find ways to prove you're better than other people. That's when I realized we actually will do much better if we think about the philosophy to start with. Right? The philosophy in life should not be how do I outdo everyone else. If you do that, you'll you'll probably never be satisfied. But if your philosophy in life is, hey, it is actually addictive to make a bunch of other people happy, oh, now I can do it for five people. Oh, now I can do it for 500 people. Oh, wow. Now I can get thousand people to come to this thing. The more that you do, the more you wanna do. And the fun part is that correlates also with traditional success. Then I realized, ah, I should be trying to push this worldwide. And if I don't do it, who will? With the things I've done in my life, I now have an opportunity to go and say, you know, I've seen what happens if you go all the way in pure competition. I've seen what happens if you go all the way and just practice problems to do the best on tests. Actually, that's not the right target. And I realized that because of my background, I would be able to shift mindsets. Then I said, this is what I have to do. I am a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The way I teach every single one of my classes is that I just go up to the chalkboard with a piece of chalk, and I write, today, we're gonna do this. But I forgot exactly how to do this, so I need all of you to suggest ideas. And then the whole class experience becomes one where the students are suggesting ideas, and I'm giving them feedback on their ideas. And what I've been working on as a social entrepreneur to make it possible for everybody to be able to experience education in this way is we run an online program. It's called LIVE. We found a way to scale up the education of critical thinking. You see, the limiting factor is to have enough coaches to lead all of this critical thinking and brainstorming, and we scale it up by making a win win situation by just observing that, one of the greatest ages to learn critical thinking is when you're 10 to 13 years old, and it turns out that some of the best people to lead ten to thirteen year old kids into the joy of being thoughtful are high school kids who are about 15 to 18 years old.
00:12:24 · Po-Shen Loh
But what I observed is that there were plenty of kids who are 15 to 18 years old who are already very clever academically, especially in math. Their limiting factor in life eventually was not gonna be their science, technology, engineering, math. It would be communication skills, confidence, and the ability to win over anybody and lead a team. So I created a program where we find kind and mathematically clever high schoolers, and then I hire professional comedians and actors to teach them how to be charismatic and how to be able to win over anybody. Because if you can convince anybody to love math, you can convince anybody to do anything. And so this this exchange, they're trained by the actors. They coach math. While they're coaching math, we pay for an actor to watch them for every hour that they're coaching math. The actor gives them real time feedback to help them become more enthusiastic, emphatic, and a more winning personality. Win win situation now. The high schoolers directly benefit. Their life becomes much better. In return, they're producing all of these critical thinking classes for kids all around the country. The architecture of this is that it just connects people. We are introducing kind and thoughtful high school students to middle school students to help them see, hey, you could become these great people who are having fun and also having a very fulfilling life. But also the way we execute the whole thing, the high schoolers all teach in pairs. That not only makes the experience more fun for the people who are learning math, but it makes it so that these kind and really mathematically clever people get to know each other. Because I don't know what kind of challenges we're gonna face in the future. I think they're gonna be quite big, and technology will make it so that whatever the challenges we face are, they're big. So we also need to have a big network of kind people who are clever.
00:14:14 · S0
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00:14:43 · Po-Shen Loh
[00:14:43] S2: Who know each other and who have trust so that if there are some civilization threatening challenges that arise, well, then maybe there will be some people who will stand up, work together, and do something about it. This is what I pay attention to as I travel around the entire country and the world. I'm actually thinking about the robustness of human society, whether or not, if there was some challenge that faced the world due to technology, are we as human civilization equipped to rise up and face that challenge? To me, it all starts from thoughtfulness. The work I do is really focused on building up autonomous human thinking. That's why the core word I use for the philosophy is thoughtful. I've watched over many years as people are becoming less and less interested in thinking. I think that actually happened because people found out that they can entertain themselves with iPads, and this unfortunately makes people also not have as much interest in concentrating and thinking about something. AI could make that much worse. The fun part of life is having your own contribution to the life that you live. Actually, I think that's why people actually like creativity. It's fun. People like to draw. People like to put their own flavor. People like to wear their own fashion. It expresses themself. This expression of yourself, it would be lost if everything you do is efficient, but just reliant on the AI which told you how to dress today. That's why I want more and more people to discover it's fun to think. It's fun to have your own twist on things, your own your own idea that you inject inside. The other dangerous thing that happens if people lose the ability to to think and reason is that it makes it far easier to deceive people. The world is so complicated that if you look at any situation in the world, sometimes depending on how you tell the story of what happened, you can say statements that are all true, which make you come up with a different feeling. I think it's really important for people to be critical and to people... For people to be able to understand what's really going on. Because sometimes when someone's talking to you, they have an agenda. Like, I'll be frank. I have an agenda. I'm trying to build a more thoughtful world, and I'm gonna be very, very upfront with you on that.
00:16:59 · Po-Shen Loh
Anyone who's watching this video, I think it's really important that we have as many people as possible find out how much fun it is to delight other people and to have the ability to think and figure that out. That's my agenda. But you see, everyone has an agenda. And if you can't think for yourself and you just listen to some authority. What if that agenda is actually to your detriment? You have no way of knowing. The technology revolution really made all of us start to realize how much of an impact bias has, in the sense that whoever makes some technology tool has some bias. What does bias really mean? Well, I guess as a mathematician, the way I would say it is two plus two is always four. That's right. What's the point of life? Oh, I don't know. Like, there's no clear definition what's the point of life. I think the point of life is is to delight as many other people as you can, but I know that you might not necessarily agree, and it's not a problem. I think it's it's healthy that we may have different starting points. The part that becomes unhealthy is where there are... Is only a very short menu of options, each of which is followed by a huge number of people. That's actually where bias comes in because we just we just mentioned so far in this in this video a couple of different, sources of AI providers. Right? We have we have Claude. We have OpenAI. There's also Gemini. If you're in China, there's DeepSeek. There are all of these, but that's relatively few. If you think about it, that's that would be sort of like saying, well, the world has lots of different viewpoints. It has five of them. Really? No. No. The world has seven and a half billion different viewpoints. There's seven and a half billion people. One of the beautiful things
00:18:44 · S0, S1
Ad[00:18:44] S0: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed dot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Ad[00:19:07] S1: Hiring now? Then this is Ad[00:19:09] S0: a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.